


and fall from heaven straight through hell

by The-Immortal-Moon (LunaKat)



Series: 2019 New Year's Resolution (Year of Bastille) [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 14:26:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17624111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/The-Immortal-Moon
Summary: Shadows always resent that which casts them.





	and fall from heaven straight through hell

It’s been a century since his making.

The dungeon is a cold place, one of endlessly dripping water and too little light and a nip in the air. She—the woman, the wife of his creator—decided that he was too dangerous to wander freely (maybe she’s right), and so she constructed this prison. The scarlet whorls on the wall are greater manacles than the ones clasped around his bone-white wrists and ankles, keeping him rooted in place while also making him vaguely ill.

Sighing, he leans his head back against the wall, eyes tracing the artistic patterns from what must be the thousandth time. There’s very little to do besides sleep and memorize patterns. No hunger—not in the traditional sense—and he doesn’t feel the cold as keenly as he might, were he actually a human being. Maybe he should be grateful he isn’t. A human mind would no doubt be driven mad by the waiting, the eternity of endless nothing.

Well, not _entirely_ nothing.

He glances up at the sound of an iron door opening. Once every six months, like clockwork. He wonders if his creator is even aware of the pattern, or if it has been lost beneath the haze of despair and desperation.

Footsteps from far above. Padding down the long, winding set of stairs to the pit where he lays, rendered catatonic by this damn array. He wonders if his creator likens it to descending into the pits of hell, as he himself does ( _sitting in church while the priest reads from a holy book, verses of a fiery lake and hideous demons_ _that torment the eternally damned_ ). Perhaps, then, his creator might also liken him to the devil waiting at the bottom.

A figure emerges. Unfamiliar. A new body, but male, so it’s definitely his creator. Only the man ventures down here anyway—the woman would be just as content if he were to starve, to wither away over the decades and then return to the dust from which he was born. Only the man, only the creator, seems to care whether he lives or dies.

The glitter of red stones joins the bloody glow of the array on the walls.

“I brought you something,” says the creator, which is obvious. He approaches—tentatively, always tentatively, no matter how greatly he had argued with the woman, that first day, that his creation was not a monster.

Despite that, despite that insistence, he is always wary. Always cautious. Muscles tensing and clenching and bracing for some sort of attack. He never just hands the stones over, either. Just sets them down close enough for him to reach, but never offers them, as though the idea of such a creature reaching out to pluck them from his palm repulses him too much. Or maybe because he thinks he’s going to lose a finger.

( _“You don’t know **what** that thing is,” he heard the woman hiss furiously from the hallway, oblivious to the fact that he was awake and had an ear pressed to the door. “It could be **dangerous**. For all you know, it’s plotting to **kill us** while we’re **sleeping**!”_)

The pebbles are warm, as they always are. Perhaps having so many lives compacted into a calcified substance does that—all that thrumming energy, condensed, the molecules vibrating so intensely that they radiate heat.

It’s difficult to maneuver with the chains, but he manages to pop one in his mouth. Swallows it dry. Hates how his deadened tongue sings to the flavor of it, when his taste buds won’t even respond to normal food. Tries to ignore the way his creator is watching him with badly concealed anticipation, with thinly-veiled hope.

“Virgil,” the creator says. Pleads.

Silent, he turns away. He knows what the creator is hoping for—that the pebbles of alchemic energy will somehow complete the reaction, quicken his blood and heartbeat and make him less of a living corpse. That the wisps of memories clinging like cobwebs to the corners of his cranium with sharpen into focus, somehow knit themselves back together to a whole being. That—that he’ll be able to hear that name and think _mine_.

And it’s not that he doesn’t, already. There is a part of him that flickers with a yearning recognition, a desperation to slip into that name like an old but well-worn shirt. There is a part of him that wants to grasp that name and emblazon himself with it.

He can’t, though. The name may fit into place like a missing piece, but there are other pieces missing, so the puzzle can never be completed. As much as he thinks _yes, that’s me_ , another part of him goes _no, it’s not_. As much as he wants to acknowledge the man standing there as... the rest of him can only think _my creator_.

Even if he did embrace that identity, would it change what happened to the first? He would just be a second, a replacement. A shadow of the original. He doesn’t want that.

Shadows always resent that which casts them.

 _Envy_ , the woman decided to call him. And it might not be a good fit either, but at least it’s his and his alone.

The pebbles aren’t going to change reality, no matter how many he imbibes. The creator even went so far as to once bring him a little piece of Philosopher’s Stone, hoping that its power might be able to fill the void of his inhumanity, to replace the soul that he is so obviously lacking. Instead, the void swallowed it, and there has been not a peep since.

In him, a futile hope still struggles to bloom, still pokes its sapling head out of the dark earth in search of nourishing sunlight. It begs for all this to stop—for the creator to stop looking at him in search of another, to realize that two people can look alike but be entirely different. It begs the creator to acknowledge this, and to embrace him anyway.

A few poignant moments pass, punctuated by the ever-present drip of water in the corner. There’s a little pool where the concrete depresses, dark and murky and foul-smelling. It’s his only constant companion, down here, in the perpetual dusk of this concrete dungeon with its ominous array carved into the wall. He hates it almost as much as he hates the creator for leaving him down here to wallow in his own imperfection.

There is a sigh, a little heavier than it normally. When the footsteps retreat, there seems to be a little more hopelessness in their trudging. He closes his eyes against the pressure gathering inside his ribcage, the agonizing schism of  _I’m sorry I’m not who you want me to be_ and _why am I not enough for you?_.

The sound of the door closing echoes for a long time before it falls silent. He feels an irrational need to mourn the loss.

* * *

He glances up when the iron door opens again. This doesn’t make sense. So far, it’s been like clockwork, a consistent pattern, unbroken and uninterrupted. His creator has never shown any interest in him beyond the occasional attempt to resuscitate a dead memory.

It’s not the creator that descends the stone steps. The creator would never take a woman’s shape—it’s the woman, the one who was his once-mother.

No, not _his_. The other person’s. Virgil’s.

“Still alive down here, are you?” Her tone is conversational, drifting over the steady drip of water in the corner and the hum of alchemy in the air and the whisper of her skirts.

 _Where else am I supposed to go?_ he thinks bitterly as he watches her descend. He doesn’t understand why she’s here, why she would bother. It’s clear that he repulses her, this creature wearing the skin of a deceased loved one.

( _although, that may be a stretch, “loved one”,_ _since those half-memories paint a picture of two stoic parents, neither prone to open displays of affection, with those rare moments of warmth emanating more often from the father than the mother_ )

Her array’s bloody light plays across the porcelain planes of her new face. Before he was banished to this concrete pit, he learned how to shift his own face, hoping it would be enough to dispel the creator’s insistence on pigeonholing him into the identity of another.

That was when she snapped, when she threw up the flamel array beneath his feet and brought him to his knees with stars flashing behind his eyes. Through the pain ringing through his being, he heard her scream to her husband that they couldn’t trust him, that he could take any face and they would never know. Now, though, he wonders if jealousy is what infuriated her so, that he could change his body and look any way he wanted without the assistance of a Philosopher’s Stone. Maybe that was why she chose the name “Envy” for him—not because of him, but because of her.

“He’s gone, you know.”

Blinking, he peers through loose, unwashed hair to gaze at her. Gone? What... what is she talking about?

“He left.” Though her voice is light, there is something bitter and hateful in the underlying cadence. “He took his things and most of the Stone and he left.”

...she’s lying. That’s the only possible explanation. There’s no way. There’s no possible—

The lines of her face are hard, unyielding. It’s hard to see it in the scarlet glow from her trapping array, but he notices that her eyes are red, the capillaries in her sclera inflamed. That sort of redness only comes from insomnia or crying, and either way, that does bode well.

No. No, he—

He comes here every six months. He comes here, and he brings pebbles of failed Stones and he—

He wouldn’t...

This is—this is all they have, the two of them. Everything they are is forged upon desperation, on wanting and hoping and waiting for the other to yield. Waiting for the other to cave, to give in.

Give in. Not give _up_.

No, he wouldn’t do that. The creator—he isn’t like the woman standing here, eyes flinty and impassive. He wouldn’t abandon his creation to the bowels of hell, wouldn’t leave him here to rot and starve and suffer for all eternity. He wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t! He always comes— _always_ comes back with more stones and tattered hope in those sad, despairing eyes and _always_ calls his not-name to try stirring up what once was.

He wouldn’t give up on that. No. If the creator were capable of giving up like that, he wouldn’t even _exist_ here today—wouldn’t be breathing, have a heartbeat drumming in his chest, living a mockery of life. Giving up is not in that man’s nature. No, no, no. That man is always, always praying, always offering his hand and placing his hopes into this empty shell he conjured up, _always_ trying to fill the void of absence. He wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t leave him.

He wouldn’t leave him.

He wouldn’t...

She’s lying. He stares at her, wildly, waits for her to fess up. To tell the truth. Because she’s lying and that man would never—would never—

Would never...

Never...

A sigh falls like a feather to the floor, and she steps forward, swishing skirts and clicking heels. There is pity in her eyes, cradled alongside the disgust she tries to shutter behind impassiveness. He instinctively curls in on himself, remembering the array the blazed beneath his feet before there was all-consuming pain, remembering that she is the one who placed this binding upon walls and banished him to these concrete bowels. Having her this close to him unnerves him.

Ever so slowly, she drifts down to her knees. They are eye-level, now. Him and this woman who loved someone he looks too much like. Or at least, pretended to love.

“It just got too much for him, I suppose,” she murmurs into the dark. “He was always a weak man, in the end.”

_But that’s not true! It... It can’t be...!_

_He can’t have..._

His gaze finds the wall and stays there while his mind struggles to process. It doesn’t make _sense_. The creator—after all the time he’s spent, all the energy he poured into reviving the dead. All the visits, all the stones, all sad looks and the desperation, the stuttering hope that keeps propelling them both down a path neither of them would willingly tread. But they are in this together, whether they like it or not, and they have been for almost a century now. And after all that... After a hundred years of...

And he just... gave up?

Pressure tightens in his chest, his throat, in the ligaments of his hands and feet. That’s—that’s not _fair_. That’s—he can’t _do_ that. Maybe—maybe he is not the person he’s _supposed_ to be, but that man still _made_ him, and in a way, that still makes him...

That makes him...

And he just...

A shudder wracks his skeleton, and then he is bowing his head to press his knees against his forehead. That’s not fair. That’s not fair. He didn’t _ask_ to look like this. He didn’t _ask_ for these half-forgotten wisps inside his head. He didn’t _ask_ for the creator to look at him like that. All he asked for—all he ever wanted—

Why—

 _Bastard_ , he thinks, curling his bony hands into tight, white-knuckled fists. Overgrown nails sink into his palms. He squeezes his eyes shut so hard that the darkness threatens to swallow him. _You called me his name, didn’t you? You thought I was him, didn’t you? Didn’t you? So then why would you— How could you—_

_How could you just **leave**?_

( _why couldn’t i ever be enough for you?_ )

Fingers ghost over his shoulder.

He jolts _hard_. Human contact has been lost to him for so long that he’s nearly forgotten what it was. Luckily, she removes her hand a moment later, for which he is extraordinarily grateful.

“Unlike him,” she says, and only then does he see the glittering key hanging from a black chord around her throat, “I don’t care what you look like.”

Unease quite understandably curls through him as she takes the key in one hand and holds it up to his eyes. Thick floral perfume radiates from her skin. The scent burns his nose, gets caught in his throat as he swallows dryly.

“I’ll make you a deal.” Her lips are cherry red. The low crimson lambent of her alchemy casts a bloody stain over her otherwise white smile. “You help me make a new Stone, and I’ll help you hunt him down. Sound good?”

Shaking his head, he turns away. No. He—he _never_ wants to see that man again. And like _hell_ is he going to partner with the person who imprisoned him.

( _and he doesn’t know what he’s capable of doesn’t know his own strength he could **kill** someone and it startles him to find that he isn’t entirely **opposed** to that idea_)

“Pity.” She clucks her tongue. “And here I thought you’d want revenge.”

_Revenge?_

“After all,” she goes on, soft and toxic, like the hiss of the mercury vapors that were his template’s end, “if not for him, you wouldn’t have had to suffer so much. Isn’t that right?”

...

...she’s right. That man brought him into existence and then refused to see the truth. He may not have been the one to lock him away down here, but he never freed him, either. Never held him, never comforted him, never treated him as anything remotely human.

If he didn’t exist, this misery would be unknown to him. There would be no horrible incompleteness plaguing his very being, no half-whispers of not-remembered things telling him to be this or that or something other than he is. He would never have known the depths of his own despair and disappointment and this awful schism that demands he be both the person he’s supposed to and yet someone else entirely.

Bitterness is something he is not unfamiliar with, but it comes back to him with a striking vehemence. It rises up in his throat like bile, churns and surges and seizes the ache of absence where his soul should be. He is left nearly trembling with it as it comes to a crest.

“Do you  _really_ want to sit here sulking?”

The chains rattle offensively loud as the manacles come loose. Slowly but surely, the array dims, the bloody light retreating and fading into the deep darkness.

It is a long time before he raises his eyes to meet the triumph in her smile.

**Author's Note:**

> I literally have no idea where this came from.
> 
> Title from the lyrics of "Quarter Past Midnight" by Bastille (Album: Doom Days). ...look, I've been really into Bastille lately, okay?


End file.
